Monday, 1 October 2007

As usual after an ISMIR I’m totally burnt out. The program was intense. My brain is still trying to absorb all the interesting conversations, ideas, results, and theories that are echoing in my ears. Some of the things I saw made me realize how close we are to reach some of the scenarios we’ve been talking about in the last 5 years (for example, Klaas Bosteels demonstrated a content-based playlist generator that learns from user feedback which he implemented on his tiny MP3 player). Other things made me reconsider assumptions I’ve made in the past (for example Hamish Allan et al. presented interesting work on music similarity: "Methodological Considerations in Studies of Musical Similarity").

It was also wonderful to have the opportunity to spend time with people that seem very familiar although I only see them once every one or two years. It’s strange how reading papers can make the authors seem so familiar.

One of the many highlights of ISMIR 2007 was when Don Byrd announced the locations of future ISMIRs. I was particularly happy to hear that ISMIR 2009 will be organized by Masataka Goto et al. (in Japan!). However, ISMIR 2008 organized by Youngmoo Kim, Dan Ellis, and Juan Bello et al. (US) and ISMIR 2010 organized by Frans Wiering et al. (Netherlands) will surely be great, too. It’s good to see ISMIR, for the first time in its history (afaik), planed out for 3 years in advance. And I heard some rumors that ISMIR 2011 will be held in Vienna again because it was such a huge success ;-)